Error 0x80070001 on Windows 10 when trying to install a new app

This is slightly off topic for me, but because I spent quite a bit of time on figuring it out and could not find this documented anywhere else, I thought I would write it up quickly.

At some point I could no longer install any new apps from the Windows Store on my Surface 3 Pro Windows 10 machine. Apps already installed would update fine, but new ones could not be added. The error was:

“Try that again. Something went wrong. The error code is 0x8007001, in case you need it”.

If we translate that number to a human readable form we get:

Incorrect function.

Not much to go on. I initially thought this was something to do with either the modern app framework or Windows installation and tried things like resetting the store with (WSReset.exe) and scanning the system files with SFC.EXE. None of these things helped. In the end it turned out that is was related to my SD card. I had an SD card installed and had previously moved a few apps to it. Apps that were so large that I didn’t want them eating up my system drive. Moving these apps somehow caused all new apps from then on to try to install on the SD card, or at least rely on it for something during the install. I shut down the computer, removed the card and could then install apps again. At this point I also reinserted the card and could now also install new apps with the card inserted. Some setting somewhere had obviously been changed. I do not know the root cause of this behavior, which is always annoying, but I am prepared to accept that I made it work.

Updating already installed apps worked because they were all on the correct (C:) drive. The default install location for apps was also set to the C: drive, which makes this even stranger…